New American Writing 29

How does this space

of violence inspire you a grip

and a manifest at best

it'd seem that at the rise

tan milestones force the fall of that

there, we should have noted

since today, everything's returned

ropes honed by the wind

admire the quakings of alloys

that lose this message

trampled behind the mount

since the envelope is not sealed

this landscape promises a word

in the rugged fold (Annie Lafleur, “from Handkerchief,” trans. François Luong)

From editor/publishers Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff come another volume of the annual New American Writing, including the section “Eleven Poets from Quebec,” seemingly curated (as well as translated, and introducted) by François Luong, who writes “I am not from Québec. I am not even remotely Canadian.” Thanks to connections between French-language writers such as Nicole Brossard and Gail Scott with west coast English-language writers such as George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt throughout the 1960s and 70s, with Coach House Press acting as (among other presses) a space between, it's almost as though English-language writers across North America could probably use a proper update to what is happening in writing across la belle province. Certainly, there are offerings I'm aware of from Brossard (who, when last I saw her, mentioned a forthcoming anthology of Quebec poets, but I haven't since heard a word), nathalie stephens (currently in Chicago, publishing books through Nightboat) and others, including some of the poets included in this current section: François Turcot, Renée Gagnon, Steve Savage, Annie Lafleur, Oana Avasilichioaei, Chantal Neveu, Alexis Lussier, Angela Carr, Alain Farah, Daniel Canty and Hector Ruiz, with some composed in English, and other pieces, translated from the French. As Luong writes:

Since the 1960s, Québécois poets do nothing like their countinental counterparts. They are not interested in a purity of language (see the recent Smiroubaud/Prigent polemic). There is a greater acceptance and consciousness of foreign linguistic elements. What Deleuze and Guattari would call a “minor literature.” Some do speak and write in English, others don't, but are conscious of those foreign influences and migrations (see François Turcot's Cette maison n'est pas la mienne).

*

This is not meant to be an authoritative gallery of poets from Québec. As a matter of fact, the poets presented here all live in Montreal.

Why does language have to be such a divide? As well as these, the issue contains a number of other noteworthy works, including fragments of a Cole Swensen work-in-progress, “Stele,” two more magnificent pieces by Edward Smallfield (we really need to see another book from Smallfield), a few more of Susan M. Schultz's “Memory Cards,” some of Anne Tardos' “Pronounce,” and this fragment of Valerie Coulton's “A Society of Rooms”:

Intertia. Beginning ideogrammatically with symbols under tongue: door, table, shutter. Invite appropriate shadow. Weight excites: wall's white idea smudged with blue. You make arch of brick's desire shoulder by spine; wrists, armpits, lift and pivot; you climb. Mouth mechanism elevates word by strand of sound to buoyancy until toppled. Build, rest, build again.

*

Ellipsis. Liquid stone. Leaving place for you to live, to have lived. Mind open on one side to trees and weather coming almost in against the glass. Where you might have allowed yourself to shelter unfolded beside a thick pane. Rain to book to memory of rain and book. Marked invisibly, in conversation with your other. Indicating a room left unfinished.

This is easily starting to become one of my favourite (or should I say, “favorite”) American journals; I'm wondering now which might be easier, complaining that it only appears annually, or try to get my hands on previous issues? Still, there's something wonderfully deliberate about how each volume is put together, less a journal than an annual anthology of pieces that bleed and blend, each feeding into the next, with such careful, clear attention. Reading these, it becomes apparent just how many American poets work in the longer project, somehow almost every work constructed as a fragment of an ongoing work, far less than Canadian journals might let on, which seems more a matter of journals, as opposed to what the poets are doing.

And then, a couple of small gems from American poet Noelle Kocot, including:

Forgive

Boomerang, lax and swift, the dictionary

Says, “unfolded,” today.

The last notes are wilting.

Love, you forgive me everything,

As I, you. I did not have to earn it.

How the forms assemble,

How I go weak in my knees...

Significance is a candy, this feeling.

It draws you into a deeper mouth.

Ongoing notes: mid-July, 2011

[Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts reading from their collaborative BookThug collection at the final Scream in High Park, July 11] Really wishing I could have made the recent Chapbook fair in Toronto run by Scream/Meet the Presses, but that didn't quite work out, and apparently derek beaulieu is heading soon to some small press fair in Oslo; what the hell? Envy, envy. At least we were able to make it to the final Scream in High Park event on July 11, ending nineteen years of Scream annuals; but sad that my first ever Scream event was also their last. Memorable lines included Shawn Micallef's assertion that the appearance of cupcake stores heralded an end to civilization, announcing: “I'm pretty sure when Rome fell, Nero wasn't fiddling, he was eating a cupcake.”

Dani Couture said all that was needed to be said about the final reading, when she reminded us that “Tomorrow's just going to be Tuesday.”

A fantastic night of readings. At least we had that.

Watch for above/ground press activity. Recently, I've been posting a couple of “poem” broadsides on the blog, reprinting from nearly-out-of-print handouts, including Michael Blouin, Christine McNair and Nicole Markotić; and, a chapbook by Robert Kroetsch, a handout at various recent memorials for him in Calgary and Ottawa (as well as at the Scream), is now available for sale. Just throw $5 at me via paypal and email your address, and I'll send you one.

Kāne'ohe HI: Susan M. Schultz, Tinfish Press publisher and editor sent along a packet of the Tinfish Retro Series chapbooks, including No'u Revilla's Say Throne (#1), Adam Aitken's Tonto's Revenge (#2) and Stephen Collis' The Primordial Density Perturbation (#3). The series originally caught my eye for the sake of new work from Vancouver poet Stephen Collis, but I'm quite glad for the other chapbooks as well, the first three produced to appear monthly in a year-long series (with subscriptions available). For Say Throne, her bio reads that “ No'uhakau'oli is rooted in Maui, while pursuing her Cultural scholarship in O'ahu at the University of Hawai'i-Mānoa. Her palapala is based on Native women's voices and indigenous storytelling.” Her small chapbook is a mix of poems, written in a mix of styles, from a short playscript, to a very compelling visual poem, and a number of lyric offerings, ranging from the fragmented, longer pieces, and this small lyric:

MAKE RICE

I rinse fists

of brown grain with water

that comes from the faucet,

and—even if I can't afford it—

I take the time to watch

the hard pellets

squeeze through my fingers,

as good Happy Valley children

squeeze through holes

in fences on private property.

Dirty water pours out,

tap water shoots in,

but I never lose that piece of rice,

because that

could be my daughter.

Stephen Collis' The Primordial Density Perturbation is a five-part, five-page piece continuing his engagement with social and economic movements, part of a long tradition of critical engagement with politics and language poetry, furthering the works of various Vancouver and Vancouver-area poets (many of whom, like Collis, have been engaged with the Kootenay School of Writing), including Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Michael Barnholden, Jeff Derksen, Peter Culley and Gerald Creede. For Collis' poem, it reads quite ominous that it begins with a quote by Sven Lütticken, that reads “The true drama of contemporary culture lies in the fact that it has become almost impossible to imagine social change that is not cataclysmic.”

1.

You you Egypt Tunisia Libya

so swept up clutter world

ideo-faith pathology—West?

underbid the Euro-waste

nostalgic trench war

poncho draped gringo films

swagger but huh? rope-a-dope

republicans once fenced their

lives on brick lingo

the blood they lapped

exploding buddha style so

fringe fest margins all

dregs and drag nets

and then the like of their

halo politicians all

grenade handed and rifle

economics proclaiming origins

as expropriations the bulge of

oil just under earth skin

rip! the jib of

state's sail snapped open

the numbers flying up

like camel train the

sonic boom of events

and big-bang pants

in fashion again this season

Philadelphia PA: I'm very pleased to start seeing publications from Hailey Higdon's what to us (press), including Lisa Hollenbach's chapbook SPECULUM (Philadelphia PA: what to us (press)), January, 2011), produced in a numbered edition of fifty copies as part of “The Dimes,” a series of short chapbooks by women writers, with future plans including, possibly, a series of short chapbooks of poetry and/or essays.

ONE POINT.

As if in a circle

[ ] gave me an eye to hold

up to or against

Let your vision be the ghost of what

Falls from the window, voice

Over and over

As her interview on the press' blog furthers, Hollenbach writes out small specks, pecks of words, letters and phrases, sprinkling big meanings in fragments and tiny spaces. What can be made from such broken speech, broken words? Hollenbach's poems are small and very lovely things.

Ongoing notes: the dusie kollectiv,

In 2010, American expatriate now living in Switzerland, Susana Gardner, put out a call for what she called “dusie kollectiv 5,” setting into motion some ninety poets in half a dozen countries (focused in the United States and scatterings of Europe), each asked to produce a new self-published work for the sake of sending copies out to all on the list. There is something rare and glorious about sending out that many chapbooks to nearly-strangers and receiving the same amount in return, many from writers I hadn’t previously been aware of. For my contribution, New Zealand poet and publisher Ross Brighton and I actually produced each other's chapbooks (see the link to the one I did of his, here; although I did one of my own, too, as well).

As the packets fly across continents and begin to collect, they will apparently be available at the dusie website at some point as pdfs. Here are a couple of chapbooks I’ve received so far.

Where WH: Dawn Pendergast’s leaves fall leaves (2011) is produced in the same way she produces the small chapbooks in her little red leaves textile series, “lovingly sewn using recycled curtains and other textile remnants,” and opens with this elegant untitled piece:

I’m little wander

er, a little wand

am I, a wad of dawn-

dering wanderous

which is one way

to place my spoon

shape. Mam-

mers, she said

I said.

In this small chapbook, I adore Pendergast’s dancing cadence, her playful hopscotch of image and word, lines that blossom light across the page. There are points at which you can actually track her following the sound, and wondering, delighted, where she might end up, nearly as unaware as she steps and she steps where she might end as the reader, surprised at just what these pieces accomplish. And her little books are beautiful, to boot. How does she maintain such lightness of line, such wonderful ease? Listen to the way her lines break and then fall, but land without bruising or injury, this first stanza of the title poem, that reads:

when fills the sky with leaves

& day bits

& dim breaks

day speaks /

cudgel the word for

casting effing naked claws

at bay

// why sweet bay

my mind ex-

alts

Honolulu HI: Poet and Tinfish editor/publisher Susan M. Schultz has been working with the idea of “memory cards” for some time, from her poetry collection Memory Cards & Adoption Papers (Potes & Poets, 2001) to her more recent Memory Cards: Wolsak Series (France: Ink in Metz, 2010). Her Dementia Blog (2008), written around her mother's dementia, is quite heartbreaking, and the other side of her interest in memory, and the fear of what might be in store for her as well. For her dusie offering, she produced the chapbook Memory Cards: Ashbery Series (2011). As she writes in her colophon:

Each of these memory cards begins from a sentence or a phrase from John Ashbery's collected poetry, Library of America edition. The first six appear in Marsh Hawk Review, guest edited by Eileen Tabios, Spring, 2011.

The memory card form: each prose poem must fit on a card.

The unbound and unnumbered (but dated, from December 27, 2010 to January 24, 2011) cards do exactly what you might think they would, moving themselves through prose poems that begin with an Ashbery line. It doesn't hurt that she's done a good amount of Ashbery's writing, including editing the anthology The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (University of Alabama Press, 1995). Using lines of his to bounce off of, one could argue that any writer could move through near-infinite directions, given the sheer amount of Ashbery's writing, and the infinite weaves of human memory; just how far could Schultz actually go?

For it is you I am parodying, though not through simple reversals, like replacing “dying” with “living” or “paradis” with “enfer.” What you infer from my intrusion is your business alone; we are a private people, after all, locked up in our mansions without furniture, gazing out at the next one over, wondering what lawn service the neighbors use. In my dream, the street directions ended with OM, as if home were nothing more than a sound to summon up an empty lot. The next soccer parent over was placing bets on college games, told me last week didn't go so well. Bookies read the leaves, while we are left with the chicken scratch of print. I open you at random, snitch a line, fear an injustice has inevitably been done. She stole money from the school, then walked away with probation. At least she paid them back.

– 30 December 2010

Brooklyn NY: For her chapbook, the science seemed so solid (blue language press, 2010), subtitled “(some poems from graceful degradation),” Brooklyn poet Betsy Fagin printed on seemingly-found paper, including what appears to be a paper placemat from something called “Monster Pizzas.” Nice. Considering her reference to “thankless jobs weigh a ton,” I would think she knows much about thankless jobs, whether retail or possibly poetry itself, and the somewhat-rough production gives her poems a kind of cadence, a credibility, in these “poems from graceful degradation.”

navigation

established trajectory—

thankless jobs weigh a ton

close observation considers

logistical world focus revelatory.

intentional. obstacles perceived

as progress surround– drawn maps,

charted courses. open avenues

of possibility avoidance.

wrongly directed to a lost wood,

toward the wall; drawn adrift

in collective undertow. time travel

captains position shifts,

re-triangulate. consider gradual

or sudden. undergone smoke wisps,

cinders, structure chrysalis frequency

imaginal cells– strange development.

ongoing notes – early September, 2007

So here I sit, broken-hearted. Okay, maybe not. Finally in Edmonton, finally in my office, trying to get work done yet still feeling completely overloaded (hence the lack of reviewing lately); did you see the nice stuff that Amanda Earl wrote about me on her blog? Also, I’ve started an interview project that started on the Alberta blog and seems to have bled through into three different blogs (apparently it’s been noticed by a few folk there and here; including this note on various reviewers for that Chicago poetry anthol…)? What surprises me most is just how many people have eaten pears lately…

Did you see this article on me in yesterday's Edmonton Journal by Todd Babiak?

Edmonton AB: Part of the fun of being in Edmonton at all is being able to get to the Olive Reading Series [see the interview I did moons ago with then-organizer Adam Dickinson], now run by T.L. Cowan, Jeff Carpenter, Thea Bowering, Douglas Barbour, Jenna Butler, Maria Chen, Meena Gupta and K.L. McKay, with featured reader, a free small chapbook by that reader, as well as an open set. Last night, the first reading of the new season was Edmonton poet Bert Almon, with his chapbook Waiting for the Gulf Stream.

It might not be the kind of poetry that jump-starts any part of me, but his reading was pretty entertaining (and it was a packed house, which was pretty cool). He also launches a new poetry collection alongside Ben Murray with Brindle & Glass at Greenwood's Books, September 16 (7925 104 St., 7pm). The next reader for the Olive Reading Series (Hulbert’s Café, 7601 115 St) is Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell [see the interview with him here] on October 6.

Kane’ohe HI: It’s always good to get a new issue of Susan M. Schultz’s Tinfish in the mail, and I’ve been (finally) able to start going through #17, from June 2007. Part of why I love this journal is for the strong writing, and for the always interesting design; some of it is just for the geographic range of it, moving Pacific Rim from where she exists on the island-that-is-a-state, all along the American west coast and into parts of Canada, publishing authors such as Kaia Sand, Kim Hyesoon, Meredith Quartermain, Shin Yu Pai, Jane Sprague and Truong Tran. Who wouldn't love a poem with such a title as "The Exiled Filipino Poet Translates into Pidgin ENglish" by R. Zamora Linmark? Or this piece, writing:

A peppery road, well oiled and ready for the taking. A man is standing on
the empty sidewalk. The sky a grayish blue, the air thick and sweet. He
considers entering the road as a stream enters a river. He would integrate
into the larger whole, perhaps adding to its darkness or width. He hesitates,
thinking to himself, “although dedicating completely to this road would
relieve me of all attachment, I am not quite ready to give up the illusion of
self.” Before he has come to a decision, a large wave arrives, pausing for a
moment, allowing the man to witness its greatness, and with a hiss and a
crumble, washes away the sidewalk, the road, the man, his thoughts. (Matt Rohrer)

Montreal QC: It’s good to see former Ottawa poet Wanda O’Connor publish a new poetry chapbook, her self-published Romance & the Tidal Boar (ImPress, 2007), produced for a reading she recently did on the east coast [see this piece I wrote on her moons ago].

my autobiography as a staircase

there is a staircase vining up the tall blank of building. it reaches the sky
and forms its metal around the elements. the staircase does not end as
a staircase. there is nothing beyond it, around it, or in support of it.

there is a building.

three elements are present. the first reaches toward the earth for support.
the second becomes the atmosphere for rest, the third, a solid form,
for comfort, the metal supports me.

anatomy is destiny.*

I imagine this as my maxim and as my civilization. the long arm of the handrail of
concept.

there are hands that run along that rail.
there is some kind of love in this.

weightless elements combine and form a mountain. I reach the speak to Moses,
gain a prophecy. I can see Hollywood from here, its loss of charm.

there is an idea of wanting, but only an idea. here I need all things. I need to feel hu-
man.

*Freud

Although a strange little production, and somewhat uneven, I very much like her use of the direct statement, and keep hoping that she will someday let above/ground press produce a chapbook in the future, perhaps a combination of this, newer work and perhaps something older as well. For information on her chapbook, or to contact her, check out her blog.